Re: [PATCH tip/core/rcu 1/2] rcu: Parallelize and economize NOCB kthread wakeups

From: Amit Shah
Date: Mon Aug 18 2014 - 13:55:53 EST


On (Fri) 15 Aug 2014 [08:04:05], Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 10:54:11AM +0530, Amit Shah wrote:
> > On (Wed) 13 Aug 2014 [06:00:49], Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 11:14:39AM +0530, Amit Shah wrote:
> > > > On (Tue) 12 Aug 2014 [14:41:51], Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > > > On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 02:39:36PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > > > > On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 09:06:21AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > > > > > On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 11:03:21AM +0530, Amit Shah wrote:
> > > > > >
> > > > > > [ . . . ]
> > > > > >
> > > > > > > > I know of only virtio-console doing this (via userspace only,
> > > > > > > > though).
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > As in userspace within the guest? That would not work. The userspace
> > > > > > > that the qemu is running in might. There is a way to extract ftrace info
> > > > > > > from crash dumps, so one approach would be "sendkey alt-sysrq-c", then
> > > > > > > pull the buffer from the resulting dump. For all I know, there might also
> > > > > > > be some script that uses the qemu "x" command to get at the ftrace buffer.
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > Again, I cannot reproduce this, and I have been through the code several
> > > > > > > times over the past few days, and am not seeing it. I could start
> > > > > > > sending you random diagnostic patches, but it would be much better if
> > > > > > > we could get the trace data from the failure.
> > > >
> > > > I think the only recourse I now have is to dump the guest state from
> > > > qemu, and attempt to find the ftrace buffers by poking pages and
> > > > finding some ftrace-like struct... and then dumping the buffers.
> > >
> > > The data exists in the qemu guest state, so it would be good to have
> > > it one way or another. My current (perhaps self-serving) guess is that
> > > you have come up with a way to trick qemu into dropping IPIs.
> >
> > I didn't get around to doing this yet; will get to it next week.
> >
> > In the meantime, I tried this on RHEL6 (with RHEL6 qemu and gcc and
> > seabios), and that exhibits the problem similarly with my .config.
>
> And I am running my tests successfully on an x86_64 system running
> Ubuntu 12.04. Some testing on 14.04 seems to require booting with
> acpi=off, leading to my perhaps self-serving guess above.

It looks like Ubuntu 12.04 has a choice of multiple kernels. Which
one are you running?

Also, is there a chance you could try this on a RHEL6 box?

Thanks,

Amit
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